Self-Hosting a Tangled Knot Using Clan and NixOS

On this page I attended a workshop on Tangled at NixCon 2026. Tangled is a code forge that federates over ATProto. That means you can self-host your own instance while maintaining the social aspect of walled garden forges like GitHub. A Knot is one of the parts you can self-host and acts as the headless git server. I also attended sessions on Clan at NixCon. Clan is a peer-to-peer computer management framework for NixOS. It lets you fully provision a remote machine in a declarative way. I've wanted to try both out for a while and they looked like they would fit together very well because both are built around Nix. I recently set up a Clan machine using PXE boot so I have a perfect place to test out a Tangled Knot. The process wasn't hard. I just had to: Create a machine specific configuration file. Configure networking pieces. Use Clan Vars to generate the Knot server master key. Configure the Knot service. Register the Knot on Tangled. Before I did that, though, I had to decide which…